A COMPARATIVE STUDY: FITZGERALD’S THE GREAT GATSBY AND WINTER DREAMS THROUGH MARXIST LITERARY CRITICISM

This study discusses about both Fitzgerald’s works entitled The Great Gatsby as a novel (1926) and Winter Dreams (1922) as a short story. These works talk about a man who is originally from low social status but try to pursue his dream to be rich in purpose to get the women that he loves. The purposes of this study are to know the reason of why Gatsby and Dexter eager to be rich and being successful financially, and whether their reasons to be rich relate to economic power and class struggle in the context of Marxist criticism that had been proposed by Karl Marx or not. This also aims to know whether or not American society at that time gave contributions regarding Gatsby’s and Dexter’s action in pursuing their dreams for being rich as what had been depicted by Fitzgerald. This study is a descriptive qualitative study and uses library research and document study. At the end, this study found that both of The Great Gatsby and Winter Dreams that Fitzgerald wrote had the same theme regarding the social status and economic power. Although these two literary works had a difference where Gatsby believed that he would be able to get Daisy when he became rich and Dexter knew that he might not be able to be with Judy because of his low social status, but after all, these works of Fitzgerald both carried a lot of social status and economic power issues which had been highly talked in 1920s.Keywords: The Great Gatsby, Winter Dream, Marxism, American Dream. ABSTRAK Penelitian ini membahas dua karya sastra karya Fitzgerald yang berjudul The Great Gatsby yang merupakan sebuah novel (1926) dan Winter Dreams (1922) yang merupakan cerita pendek. Kedua karya ini menceritakan tentang seorang pria yang sebelumnya berasal dari kalangan kelas ekonomi rendah tapi mencoba untuk menggapai mimpinya untuk menjadi kaya dengan tujuan untuk mendapatkan wanita yang dicintainya. Tujuan dari penelitian ini adalah untuk mengetahui alasan mengapa Gatsby dan Dexter ingin sekali untuk menjadi kaya dan mapan secara ekonomi, dan apakah alasan mereka ...